Tag Archives: friends

Most valued

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I spent the afternoon with my mom, her sister, my wife and my kids. My aunt had us in stitches. It was wonderful having a good belly laugh. My favourite line from my auntie. “I like living by myself. I’m fine to talk to myself, I don’t need anybody else. It’s only a problem if I hear voices talking back, other than that, I’m good.”

Before this, I spent most of the day with an old friend. I can’t travel back home to my mom and not find time to see my buddy.

It’s just wonderful to realize that what I value most are my family and friends. Give me this, and my health, and I really don’t need much else from this world.

I feel blessed.

The gatherings

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The events couldn’t be further apart with respect to the kinds of emotions felt, but as you get older it’s likely that the only times you meet for large gatherings are weddings and funerals. Celebrations of new beginnings and ultimate endings.

The one thing they have in common is bringing people together. Family and friends making the effort to travel long distances to share a common space with each other.

A chance to see once little people all grown up, and to see the age lines in those who are like you, starting to show the wear of time. A chance to catch up on the news of lives seen in bits and spurts. A chance to hug, to chat, to laugh, to cry.

A chance to be together, sporadically celebrating beginnings and endings.

Bad weather, good day

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I dropped my car off at the designated location and my buddy picked me up, boat-in-tow. There was a light drizzle as we headed to Long Point on Lake Erie. When we arrived at the lake it was pouring rain. Fortunately the hard downpour didn’t last too long and settled back to a drizzle.

We fished along the outside of the retaining wall which served to protect the boat launch, not wanting to be too far away with a possible thunderstorm in the forecast. My buddy caught 3 small bass and I came up empty handed before we headed in for lunch.

We planned an early lunch to coincide with when the worst rain was scheduled according to our weather radar we had looked up on my phone. Sure enough the rain really picked up just as we were heading to the covered picnic area.

Then we ate delicious deli sandwiches as rain poured down. Like clockwork, the rain started to subside minutes after the radar map said the worst had passed, but it was possible it would continue to rain the rest of the day.

Still, we got back in the boat and headed out. We crossed the bay, knowing the worst of the rain was over and wanting to hit the shallow reeds we fished a couple years ago. Sure enough the fish started biting, and my friend was relieved that his guest was also able to catch some fish. And the rain stopped.

It would have been easy to let the rain discourage us. To cancel the trip, or to call it a day at lunchtime. But instead we decided to make the most of a very wet day. The reality is that we would have had a great day even if we didn’t catch fish… but I’d be lying if I said that catching 20+ fish between us didn’t make the day that much more special.

And that’s a wrap

My visit ‘home’ has come to an end. I had a wonderful time visiting with family and friends, and I achieved a lot. I sorted through the last of over 500 boxes of my dad’s files, and cleaned up my mom’s garage.

Last year working in the garage was almost all I did while here. This year I balanced the work with visits to friends and family. This year it really felt like a holiday. It helped that the majority of the work was done on my last trip, and yet it still took 7 trips to the dump with a packed RAV4 to clear out and recycle the last of his files.

I’ve kept 6 boxes of his work that I don’t know what I’m going to do with? This is his work that I know is innovative and brilliant, but who do I share it with? And how? My dad would have wanted it thrown away, but it would be sad to see the knowledge and insight he was able to achieve vanish.

But for tonight that is a question that will have to wait until another day, because I head home in the morning and this trip is a wrap.

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The accompanying image was taken with my mom after a walk earlier this evening.

The right tool for the job

Last weekend’s Coquitlam Crunch walk was cold. We were the only ones in the parking lot at 8:30am.

We walked about 1/3 the way up then we put on our grip-on cleats, and the cold air was a lot more difficult for me to tackle compared to the actual walking conditions. Still, we usually do the walk in 55 to 56 minutes and it took us 1 hour. A four minute difference.

Today was another story. It started the same with just us in the parking lot, but the lot was very slushy and slippery and so Dave and I put our over-shoe cleats on right away.

Walking conditions this time were much harder to tackle. One thing that added to the challenge was that we had to stop at least 10 times for Dave to adjust his cleats, which kept slipping off of his shoes. I don’t think Strava counted all the adjustment stops because when I stopped my timer it said 1 hour and 14 minutes, but it saved the time as 1 hour and 11 minutes.

That’s a significantly slower time due to the slippery, slushy conditions. We don’t mind, it wasn’t a race, and we love the opportunity to be together, get some exercise, and also feel the accomplishment of ‘just doing it’ even when conditions are less than favourable. But one thing that was quite clear was that my cleats provided a much better experience than Dave’s. In essence, my cleats were a tool that I used, but didn’t have to think about, didn’t have to manage. I put them on at the start, they did their job, and I took them off at the end. Dave’s cleats needed his attention. They took away from the flow of the experience… they interrupted our walk.

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a big deal, it didn’t ruin or walk or anything like that, they simply required our attention. On the way down Dave suggested that we think about a metaphor for the experience and the best one we came up with was, “Sometimes it’s worth getting a great tool instead of accepting and tolerating the use of a good tool.”

The cleats I own were just $21 on Amazon, and a few dollars more than the ones Dave has. The cost difference isn’t much, but the experience is so much better. Unfortunately after our walk last week, I forgot to share the link with Dave until yesterday, so he’ll get his by Monday and be ready for next week, but they didn’t come in time for today’s walk.

It’s a good lesson to think about though. Sometimes we just use a tool because it’s the one we have, the one we’ve always used, or the one that is easy to access, rather than seeking the best tool for the job. Sometimes it’s worth the time and research, and/or the extra cost, to get a tool that does the job extremely well… and reduce the challenges of using a less than ideal tool.

In the grand scheme of things, we’ll probably only need these cleats 1-3 more times this entire year, and if Dave stuck with his, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But there are things in our lives that we readily tolerate that could become ‘invisible’ and require less of our time, energy, focus, and attention… working seamlessly because we have found the right tool for the job.

Seizing Moments

Yesterday I had the opportunity to have lunch with my admin team. Now when I say that I’m talking about 3 ‘teammates’ that do not work in the same building as me. So when we can get together and enjoy a meal it’s a special moment. The moment was made that much more special because two of the three people I met are moving on… one to a new position, and the other one retiring. Then, after work, I connected with some other administrators for a wellness gathering. It was wonderful to spend that time connecting with colleagues that I don’t always see during my typical work week. And when I came home, my wife and I had a wonderful evening together. We both seem to have a little more energy than we usually do on a Friday night. It was a fun night of laughter and conversation.

This morning I did the Coquitlam crunch with my buddy, and while it was cold and early, and we were the only ones in the parking lot, it was a ‘seize the moment kind’ of opportunity. This was our 120th Crunch since we started 3 years ago in January 2020. My buddy suggested that the title of this post should be “Just Do It”, and that was the initial plan, but my thoughts go a little beyond that this afternoon.

After our walk and coffee shop social, I went home and said bye to my wife and helped her pack the car to head over to the island to visit her parents. Then my daughter called and asked for a ride because she spent an anniversary night out with her boyfriend and they were heading home from downtown. After dropping her boyfriend at his house, my daughter and I decided to go and enjoy a sushi lunch at a wonderful restaurant. I can’t express how wonderful it is to have grown-up kids who still look forward to a meal with their father (and yes, especially when he’s paying).

Now I am sitting in my hot tub, penning my ideas using voice to text, and even enjoying a little visit for my cat.

Visits with colleagues, chats with my wife, walks with friends, meals with family, and hot tubs on a cold winter day, these are all small little moments individually… But weave them together, and they make for an absolutely wonderful life.

We sometimes go headlong into work, and bury ourselves in busyness, not realizing that we don’t have to put everything on hold until our next vacation, or gathering with family or friends. Tiny moments, planned, and unplanned, are the moments we need to seek and enjoy.

Festive feelings

Yesterday I went to two different social gatherings, a breakfast and an after work event. The day before I was at a big Christmas dinner. It’s that time of year when we get together to celebrate, socialize, and fill our bellies with food. This past weekend I wrapped presents and stockings. Although my daughters are in their 20’s, they still get stockings to open on Christmas Day.

It’s wonderful to gather and spend time with family and friends. It makes me feel blessed to work in an environment where I feel helpful, useful, and productive. I feel blessed to be in a loving family that actually likes spending time together. And I enjoy the festivities that we hold this time of year.

Gathering with people you care about and enjoy being with is special, and it reminds me how important it is to find the time to connect and to be social. It makes me wonder why I don’t make more of an effort to do so when it’s not for a special occasion. There are good reasons to connect all year, we don’t need to wait until a holiday, or year’s end to feel festive and to gather with friends… we can be festive any time of year.

In the neighbourhood

Had a buddy drop by today while on a bicycle ride. It was wonderful to get an unexpected visit. An unscheduled visit just isn’t something that happens anymore.

I grew up in a house where the front door was almost never locked. There were days that I would come home from school and a friend would be waiting in the basement for me. They’d open the door and announce that they were there to visit me. My mom wouldn’t even come down the stairs, she’d just tell them I’m not home yet and to go to the basement. A couple of them would even help themselves to milk and cookies before going down the stairs. My mom wouldn’t think twice of feeding them dinner as well. For years we thought my mom’s favourite part of the chicken was the wings, but she just always took them to make sure we had enough food for our unexpected guests. ❤️

I had an older cousin who would drop by unexpectedly and see what’s for dinner. If she didn’t like what she saw, she just left. Other times she’d call and tell my mom, “Don’t cook, I’m making dinner tonight.” That meant that we were having Kentucky Fried Chicken. We loved her visits whether she was bringing food or sitting with us to have what we were having.

I miss the days of unexpected visits, of people dropping by because ‘I was in the neighbourhood’. There was the spontaneity of hanging out and/or breaking bread when it wasn’t at all part of the day’s plan. Even today, my buddy texted before knocking on the door… back in the day there was no opportunity to call if you were in the neighbourhood unless you made an effort to find a payphone. Today, we’d know days in advance before one of our kids brought a friend over just for a visit, much less a meal. And almost nothing is planned on the same day.

Nowadays if there’s an unexpected knock on the door your mind immediately goes to either a package delivery or someone soliciting something. I miss the delight of opening our front door and having a friend there without a plan being made well in advance. Today, I was treated with that again, and it was wonderful.

Just a call away

Today I saw a sunset in Greece. It was hours ago, and although the sun hasn’t set here yet, my daughter is on a Greek island and she FaceTime’d me. The photo shared above is from a Snapchat she shared just before calling. She was on a balcony at her hostel, and we chatted for a few minutes while her friends got ready to go to dinner.

When my wife did a similar backpacking trip 30 years ago she spoke to her parents by collect call each time she was heading to or arrived in another country and that would be it for contact for days if not longer than a week. For this trip my wife is in contact with our kid almost daily, even if just by WhatsApp chat. She checks in with her dad a little less frequently, knowing I get the updates from my wife.

Time zones are the only challenge to communication. As I’m writing this at 7:30pm here, and it’s 5:30am in Greece. But beyond that, it’s pretty awesome that we can stay connected… for free with a simple wifi connection. This shouldn’t still amaze me but it does. It would take me 14.5 hours including a layover to get to her, but I can see her ‘live’ on my phone with the only challenge being what time we go to sleep.

Makes me think, who else is just a call away, but I haven’t made the effort?

The surprise discovery

We were 16 or 17 years old and avid fisherman. Living in North York, a suburb north of Toronto, we didn’t get out fishing too often, but we tried to go as often as we could. I remember skipping school one day and taking the bus to a river to fish. I caught a beautiful brown trout, and wanted to take it home, but had to release it because I couldn’t come home from school with a fish.

We loved to catch bass and we were good at it. My friend Dino had a cottage on a lake called Bass Lake in Orillia, and when we would go there we’d catch 20-30 bass in a weekend, and we knew that was more than any of the other fishermen on the lake.

Either Dino or my other fishing friend, Gus, discovered Mussleman Lake just a 30-35 drive from our houses, and we had a new favourite spot to go to, close to home. We would bass fish in the shallows of this small, but deep lake every weekend that we could get there. Sometimes we’d just wade through the water for hours, waist deep with our shoes on. Other time’s we’d rent an aluminum row boat to paddle around the lake. And we caught a lot of bass!

I remember once, Gus had a big one on his line and just before he could get it, it snapped his line. A while later I caught a nice 4-pounder and we kept that one for dinner. Back home, I was cleaning the fish in my back yard and we found 2 crawfish and Gus’s lure in the belly of my fish.

We went back to Mussleman Lake a lot. And we caught a lot of bass. There was one day when we were in a rented aluminum boat and we had paddled to the upwind-side of the lake, to look for calmer water, since the wind was making the shallows choppy and the conditions were not favourable for bass. After unsuccessfully fishing the calmer, but still choppy, side for a while we thought maybe the fish had gone deeper to avoid the rougher water. We decided to use the wind to our advantage and troll across the middle of the lake. We each cast our lures behind the boat and Dino rowed slowly, with the wind helping to speed us up, keeping our lines taught, as they followed behind the boat.

Then Dino’s line snagged something. He stopped rowing and started pulling his line in. But it was really stuck. As he reeled in, our boat slowly went backwards, pulling us towards the snag. “I think it’s a log.” Dino said, before saying, “Actually, I think it’s a fish.” Then, “No, it’s a log.”

Then the log dislodged and started coming to the surface. “It’s coming up, careful not to snap you line,” I said. At this point Gus and I had reeled our lines in and were standing near the middle of this little boat. Dino was in the back, rod curved from the tension of dragging this big log from the depths of the lake. It was almost at the surface when it moved sideways. Then a fat, approximately 4-foot long pike surfaced with a huge splash of its tail.

This scared Gus, and he stepped back flailing his arms. He knocked me over and a box of cookies saved me from getting stitches. I fell backwards and my head landed on the cookies, crushing them against the hard aluminum bench. The fish splashed and flailed a couple more times and broke Dino’s line. We were shocked. We had no idea there were pike in this small lake, and certainly no idea that there were any fish that big to be caught.

The game had changed. No longer did we head to this lake to fish for bass in the shallows. We went to Canadian Tire and bought ourselves higher poundage fishing line, longer metal leaders to prevent the pike’s sharp teeth from cutting our line, and lures that sank deeper that the ones we used for bass in the shallows.

And then, after many trips of only ever catching bass at this lake, we started catching pike. A lot of pike. There were some unsuccessful days, but they usually ended with us in the shallows catching a bass or two. I find it so interesting that it took this little trip across the windy lake for us to learn what to look for. But once we knew what to look for, well that’s all we needed to find them… seek and ye shall find.